Magento

oh! great ...shadowbox looks great and the tutorial seems very instructive too !! But I am seeing a lot of these and had some questions -

1. How to decide on lightbox or lightwindow or shadowbox
2. Will this cause any major impact on the page load time?

My preference visually is Shadowbox, as the controls are out of the way at the bottom of the image, but they are ALWAYS visible, where with lightbox if you have multiple images you sometimes have to remind yourself to move the mouse over the image on the left or right side to get the control to display… so you can see them.

I like the concept for keeping things clean and hiding the controls, but in this case if you have multiple images probably one of the biggest things is to move between the images, so I’d rather see the controls instantly and know exactly where to move the mouse the instant I want to move to the next image (I have a tendency to forget about using the keyboard arrow keys to move between images).

Not that you couldn’t change this with the others, but I do like the white text on a black background with Shadowbox for the title, and controls because it seems to highlight the actual photo a little more, which is the main purpose with this kind of tool. The way this is done, it makes the controls and title less significant visually, but the controls still remain present and quickly/intuitively accessible, and that’s the part I like the most about shadowbox.

The white footer in lightbox seems to be more connected with the image, like it’s a part of the image, and I tend to find it draws my attention away from the image. Lightbox is great, and has a really nice area for captions, if the caption is important to the image you are displaying. The close button is more obvious with Lightbox and also suplements the command “close” with a symbol “x” that is universally recognized.

Depending on both the type of person that is coming to your site, and how well they use the controls might be one things to consider. The other might be how you intend to use it, and what kind of content you end up displaying inside the box.

So, there is an opinion on the differences, both are great tools, and Chad, thank you very much for providing a guide on how to make this work with Magento.

this is a nice improvement for useabillity
looks great.

@srinigenie:
2. 88 KB Download. Its made with the YUI from Yahoo i think its quite fast.

The demos on http://mjijackson.com/shadowbox/#demos were quite slow… is that due to the site or inherent with the Shadowbox code?

I prefer Floatbox. http://randomous.com/tools/floatbox/ It’s based on Lytebox, which was based on Lightbox.  Like Shadowbox, it also keeps the controls visible at all times, but you can also click on the right or left side of the image to navigate.  Which image viewer you choose is largely up to personal preference.  I’ve tried nearly all of them, and Floatbox is my favorite for now.

Hi i960,

Floatbox http://randomous.com/tools/floatbox/ is really fast !!
Nice that you can navigate with on screen controlls (DHTML - Layer) like “NEXT” “PREVIOUS”.
Its much faster than the normal Lightbox - http://www.lokeshdhakar.com/projects/lightbox2/.